The Skeleton Light
Sixteen years of design leading up to Travelling At Night
"It's not a loop - it's a spiral!"
That's Alan Wake, in Alan Wake 2. If you try to attribute the quote in the normal way, you get this:
"It's not a loop - it's a spiral!" - Alan Wake, Alan Wake 2
which looks ineluctably like a typo. Anyway, spirals. Tomorrow is the seventh anniversary of the release of Cultist Simulator. A couple of thoughts about how we got here from there, and how we got there from somewhere else.
When I started making Cultist, I'd never coded anything in Unity at all. hadn't done any actual coding since I built the Fallen London CMS (once nicknamed 'Jonathan' and later rechristened StoryNexus). Once that was up and running, I focused on writing interactive narrative inside that CMS. Which did have loops, ifs, variables, a lot like a programming language - but a very soft-cornered, simple, limited one.
It occurs to me that it might seem odd for a programmer to go from using a versatile and powerful programming language to using a soft-cornered, simple one. One reason is that I wanted, from the start, to build a system that let a team work on expanding a big organic narrative - hence 'storylets' - and I knew that most people who wrote for Fallen London wouldn't be programmers. But there are two other reasons I want to talk about.
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